Lynn Maderich: Coming Home - Spring 2007 Issue of Horses in Art Magazine

Lynn Maderich: Coming Home

by Sarah H. Crampton

"Nosy" Oil on canvas, 24 x 20, by Lynn Maderich. "The head of Nosy and the high contrast glow on the body are rendered fairly tightly. Yet the hay bale in the left background is only suggested. Although it supports the composition and the mood of the scene, I don't want the viewer's eye to get caught back there."
After four years of classical training in oil painting to learn traditional techniques at the Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Lynn Maderich is reemerging as an artist. The experience exceeded her every hope and made Maderich believe in her art as never before. For four years she drew and painted the human figure, still life, portraits and interiors with steady critiques from instructors who can trace an unbroken line from student to teacher all the way back to Napoleon’s portraitist Jacques-Louis David in eighteenth century France.

Lynn relates, "The real treasure was learning to see: how to approach a subject abstractly to establish the big look, analyzing value accurately, enhancing volume and atmosphere with edge work, learning to see color as value first while still finding the subtle vibrating variations in nature that contribute to luminosity. I brought my own talent and years of artistic work to the school, but I watched my ability transformed by the knowledge I acquired. The work I can do now is dramatically different from what I did previously."

The inevitable happened. She applied her new oil painting skills to her love and understanding of the horse. Using her new skills, her third horse painting, Window Watcher, was accepted into the American Academy of Equine Art 2005 Juried Fall Show and won an award. In 2006, two paintings were in the AAEA Fall Show and Lynn was sure it couldn’t get any better than that. It did. Both Nosy and Expectant Mothers received awards and recognition. Lexington’s Cross Gate Gallery saw Nosy at the AAEA show and eventually showed and sold it.
Lynn Maderich working on Window Watcher, award-winning piece at the AAEA 2005 Fall Juried Art Show.

"As I painted that first equine oil late in 2004, it seemed to flow without great effort," Lynn remarks. "I knew I had come home. From now on I am primarily an artist who paints horses. Within that I still see a great range with sporting art, human and horse portraits, and landscapes to create natural settings for my equine subjects.

"What we love as Old Master art all occurred B. C. – before camera," Lynn continues. "Their brilliant paintings were all based on studying the world directly. While the camera focuses indiscriminately on the entire subject, the human eye moves over the subject, focusing sequentially. I try to paint to replicate the way you’d see the subject if you were in its presence."

Lynn will teach her first equine workshop at the Taos Art School in New Mexico this July. Her new paintings have received considerable attention considering they were viewed for the first time only eighteen months ago.

Maderich states, "The horse is an extraordinary subject. Painting a horse in summer coat is like painting the human nude: both are a poetic expression of intricate anatomical detail expressed in balance and beauty. No still life of fruit will ever carry the emotional charge of a beautifully rendered equine painting."

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